And she was not entirely alone in her deliberations. She had friends at school who seemed to have a better grasp of the outside world than she had, whose comments opened windows. There was Denise Scooter, who was determined to be a nurse, and who plodded her way through examinations with awesome purpose, all the more awesome in view of the fact that Denise was so squeamish that she fainted at the very sight of a hypodermic needle or a bleeding knee. There was Lizzy Little, equally determined to be a hairdresser, who would practise on any of the class that would let her; once she cut off so much of Kate’s springy brown hair in an effort to straighten it that Kate had to go round with a scarf on her head and everyone thought she’d got lice. And there was Pauline Scott, whose parents ran the Fortunes of War, and who was marked more by panache than determination. Her confessions in the badness stakes had occasionally alarmed even Kate, though she hoped she had never shown as much. Pauline, a handsome redhead, had achieved notoriety in childhood by walking round the parapet of her parents’ pub, three storeys up, in her pants, with a plate of sandwiches on her head; her adolescent exploits had been equally dashing though less innocent, and she had placed firmly in Kate’s mind the awareness that sex was a possible exit route from Romley. It is perhaps to Kate’s credit, in modern ideological terms, that she did not take this traditional exit, much as she appreciated its advantages. A heritage of sewage, agoraphobia, and women’s magazine correspondence columns had planted a prudent impulse in her.

Sex, however, was clearly a factor of growing importance, one that could hardly be ignored. During her last year Kate took up with an old flame and tease from Arblay Street, Danny Blick, now in his last year at Pinstead Green. Danny was a sharp lad, a con man and dealer in the making; he and his elder brother had been among the ringleaders of Peter’s tormentors, and Kate had once thrown a brick at him, an act for which she had been forgiven, and which indeed had earned her some respect. “You were a right little madam,” sixteen-year-old Danny would say admiringly, smart in his winkle-pickers and drainpipes, and Kate would flounce proudly. She liked Danny; he had a bit of spirit, he wasn’t one of those who were going to be herded off to the gas works or the jam factory. He had other views of worldly success. His father was a dustman, and Danny had early picked up the art of sorting through rubbish for saleable items. Scavenging was in his nature; during the war, as a small boy, he’d made good pickings from bombed houses, and by the time he was fifteen he had a busy little trade in spare parts, old bottles and buttons, cast-off clothing and old magazines. The pickings of Arblay Street and its immediate vicinity were not very rich, but Danny had followed his Dad into neighbouring districts where the rubbish was of a better quality, and quickly developed an eye for saleable junk; even more usefully, he developed contacts in the markets of the East End. This was before the days when middle-class mothers took to dressing themselves and their offspring from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, but even then there was a certain amount of entrepreneurial middle-class infiltration, and Danny struck up a useful friendship with an ambiguous character called Hunt, a man of indeterminate age and background, with a posh voice and an interesting network of acquaintance. Hunt was not strictly a crook, and certainly did not belong to the organized underworld which Danny might otherwise have entered; the entertainments he offered were of a more rarefied nature, and appealed both to Danny and to Kate, neither of whom would have had the nerve for a life of serious crime.